iTunes causes full system hang! help!

A

Anthony

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Seemingly randomly my system hangs on me... the mouse still moves around (and its just an arrow, no spinning beach ball or anything) but I can't click or do anything. The current song will keep playing but skip on me - it will play maybe 5 seconds of music, pause for about 30 seconds, play another 5 seconds.. etc. I have all my MP3s stored on a separate hard drive so at first I thought maybe it was disk problems, but I also have a number of video files on the drive and never have any problems accessing those. The SMART statuts for the drive says its ok and everything checked out with Drive 10 so I'm guessing its iTunes related and not disk i/o. It happens mainly when I'm listening to music, but has happened once when I was ripping a CD, and once when I was exiting iTunes. I've never had any hangs/crashes otherwise, it only happens when iTunes is running, and its seemingly random. It might happen with a particular album, then I can reboot and listen to the same album and its fine.. so it doesnt appear to be related to specific files either. Just wondering if anybody has any ideas, I like listening to music while I'm working but can't now because it makes my system stability unpredictable and I don't want to lose my work.

I'm running 10.3.2 on a DP 867 mirror drive door with 768 ram. Running iTunes 4.2 (72) (I think 72 is the build number maybe? Thats what it says in the about dialog..)
 
Have you tied to Repair Permissions (with Disk Utilities)? That might help. Also, try to remember when you first stated noticing this problem and then try to trace the problem to a bad mp3 tag, bad haxie install, etc. Also, try to run Top in Terminal.app to see if your processors spike when iTunes is open.
 
Thanks for the suggestions but I repair permissions on a regular basis and knowing what repair permissions actually does its pretty safe to say it has nothing to do with it. I also doubt its related to a specific mp3 anywhere because like I said a song might give me trouble once, and after a reboot it is just fine... in fact I've never had it crash twice on the same song before. I have something like 12,000 mp3s (yes legally, I have a massive cd collection and spent a while archiving them all on a dedicated hard drive) so tracking the problem down to a specific file is near impossible and is probably irrelevant anyway. Unfortunately the problem has been going on for a while but only recently have I gotten fed up with it to the point of trying to figure out whats going on. I do believe it started since I've upgraded to Panther however. As for cpu usage, everything appears normal when its playing, and I can't check whats going on when it actually freezes on me because the system is totally unresponsive (I've tried to SSH in from another machine to look at the processes but it won't even connect.) It seems to occur most when the procs have heavy load though - for example if I'm running virtual PC or when I'm encoding a video file and trying to listen to music at the same time... but I don't have any problems running at high cpu capacity without iTunes otherwise (I've had it simultaneously encoding two video files for almost 8 hours straight at 100% cpu usage and it doesn't crash.. so I don't think its related to heat/ram or anything of that nature...) but I open iTunes and play a few songs then bam I lose it. It has also occured when I was just using the machine to listen to music and not running any other programs though so its tough to say. I looked high and low on Apple's knowledge base but couldn't find anything remotely related.
 
O.K. Now, have you tried to log in as another user and access the Music folder that way. This will see if the problem in the application/system, your user account. Believe it when people say preferences can still play havoc with OS X.

Also, www.macosxhints have hundreds of iTunes hints that seem a little similar to your situation. Just do a search on iTunes. Good Luck.
 
I also have a dual 1GHz MDD and the same exact thing happens to me ever since installing Panther. I have a folder with a large ammount of music in it and occasionally now, at random, my system will completely lock up, with the mouse still functioning. You can't bring up the force quit window or access any files whatsoever, requiring 100 pounds of pressure to hold down that annoying metal restart button for 5 seconds. I've not found a way around it yet but I'm sure that it's Panther-related.
 
yeah this happens to me, i had to clean install, hasnt happened again yet, lets see how it develops
 
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